Eruditorum Presscast: The Pyramid at the End of the World
The podcast for The Pyramid at the End of the World is up for your listening enjoyment. You can download it here.…
Elizabeth Sandifer
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The Proverbs of Hell 10/39: Buffet Froid
BUFFET FROID: Literally “cold buffet,” referring specifically to a charcuterie platter of thin-sliced meats. In this context, a joke about Georgia Madden’s shredding skin.
It goes without saying that there is a strange unreality here, but this is presented very differently from how Hannibal usually proceeds. It’s never before had to conjure a disposable POV character just to kill her off a few minutes later. Part of this is the peculiarities of Georgia Madden – she’s unsuitable to be a POV character herself, and there’s only one other choice. But a more basic reason is that this is the opening of a horror movie, with Madden being positioned as something that comes at the show from an odd angle She doesn’t quite belong in this series. Unlike with “Œuf,” a previous case of a killer of the week who’s not quite right for Hannibal, this is something the show is at least conscious of this time.
Timeline of events.
- May 2013: “Buffet Froid” airs.
- July 2013: Steven Moffat casts Lars Mikkelsen, brother of Mads Mikkelsen, in “His Last Vow”
- February 2014: Moffat writes “Listen,” featuring a monster that grabs your ankle from under the bed.
I leave you to your own conclusions.
HANNIBAL: We both know the unreality of taking a life, of people who die when we have no other choice. We know in those moments they’re not flesh, but light and air and color.
WILL GRAHAM: Isn’t that what it is to be alive.
Hannibal’s line here is a characteristically interesting blend of deceit and honesty. His account of people becoming “light and air and color” is quite untethered to the handful of instances of actual necessity in which Hannibal has killed someone, and for that matter an unusual description for Hannibal, whose victims are pointedly never “not flesh.” Some explanation is offered by the source, which is unsurprisingly the Thomas Harris novels, where a similar account is given by Francis Dolarhyde, who describes killing this way while projecting this assessment onto Hannibal. Its repurposing into a half life with which Hannibal ensnares Will into mutual aesthetic appreciation is clever.
The misdrawn clocks are one of the defining images of the latter part of the first season – an immediately arresting image that communicates wrongness and sinister intent without actually having anything overtly horrifying about them. In this regard they are much like the trypophobic food designs, the cluster of numbers and vast expanse of white space both communicating a sense that this is not right even beyond the contextual horror of Hannibal’s manipulations, which are suddenly revealed to be far more advanced than the audience had realized. Note, of course, the consistent feature of Will’s breakdown: the decoherence of time.
…JACK CRAWFORD: You contaminated the crime scene.
WILL GRAHAM: I thought I was responsible for it.
JACK CRAWFORD: You thought you killed that woman?
WILL GRAHAM: Sometimes with what I do —
JACK CRAWFORD: What you do is take whatever evidence there is and extrapolate. You reconstruct the thinking of a killer, not think you are a killer.
The Pyramid at the End of the World Review
A recurrent and to my mind fascinating theme of Peter Harness’s Doctor Who work has been its distinct hostility to democracy. Kill the Moon hinges on the flagrant disregard of the expressed wishes of humanity, while the Zygon two-parter ultimately endorses the existence of unelected guardians who lie to people in order to keep them under control. I should stress, if it’s not obvious, that my fondness for this is not straightforwardly a quasi-neoreactionary rejection of democracy or endorsement of dictatorship – rather it is specifically the extent to which the episodes themselves seem conflicted on this. It’s a bit of grit that complicates the show’s default ethos of liberal centrism – something that extends naturally out of its embrace of rebelliousness and dissent, but that the show usually avoids having to look at head-on.
So it’s not especially a surprise that Harness, writing in the heat of 2016, turns in a script that is more explicitly about the terrible decisions that humanity makes than ever before. This time there is no undemocratic savior to be had. Indeed, there’s not a savior of any kind – the bad decision is taken and the bad guys win. The Doctor’s scheme to stop them is basically for naught. For the most part it’s an even bigger defeat for the Doctor than Extremis was, and is certainly the most bluntly pessimistic thing Harness has written for the show.
For the most part, this works. Certainly it’s something I’m glad the series did. But as with Oxygen, there’s a grimness to it that keeps it from ever quite being fun. There are moments of humor, to be sure, and it’s difficult to seriously suggest that an episode marching towards an ending like this while also situating itself as the middle part of a trilogy that starts with Extremis would be very frock. But there’s a nagging frustration – a sense that “geopolitical thriller” is not the Doctor Who subgenre that Harness was best pigeonholed into. I mean, I can see why it happened – many of the best bits of both Kill the Moon and the Zygon story were the overtly political bits. But what made those stories really sing was the juxtaposition between the snarling politics and the baroque ridiculousness. Here, lacking a fundamental part of the equation, Harness is… well, still fantastic, to be clear, but not at the ecstatic heights of the last two seasons. Which, to be fair, you can thus far say about Series 10, which is starting to shape up a lot like the back half of Series 7: no disasters, but no stone cold classics either.
And of course, we should be clear: this is an absolutely bonkers political thriller. Which is to say, it’s still clearly Doctor Who, and not just because of touches like the corpse monks or the “strands of history” plastic tubing. The Doctor Whoness of it comes as much from what isn’t there, like even a vague account of why the Russian, American, and Chinese militaries are in close proximity in a foreign country or where the hell the entire rest of the chain of command is.…
Eruditorum Presscast: Extremis
I’m joined by Jack Graham to talk Extremis. It doesn’t so much go off the rails quickly as never actually manage to find the rails in the first place. You can download that here if you’re so inclined.…
The Proverbs of Hell 9/39: Trou Normand
TROU NORMAND: A palate cleansing drink of apple brandy, sometimes with a small amount of sorbet. Your guess is as good as mine, frankly.
One of the show’s most emphatically memorable murder tableaus – probably the only one to give Eldon Stammetz and his mushroom people a run for their money. It also serves, however, as a case study in the schizoid nature of this season. More than anywhere else in the first season, “Trou Nourmand” demonstrates the degree to which these cases of the week are a charade. The totem pole murders are barely a feature of the episode, squared away with almost comical efficiency midway through the fourth act while the plot focuses instead on Will’s psychological collapse and new developments with Abigail.
BRIAN ZELLER: The world’s sickest jigsaw puzzle.
JIMMY PRICE: Where are the corners? My mom always said start a jigsaw with the corners…
BRIAN ZELLER: I guess the heads are the corners?
BEVERLY KATZ: We’ve got too many corners. Seven graves. Way more heads.
In which Zeller, Price, and Katz demonstrate that the aesthetics of murder tableaus are not their strong suit.
WILL GRAHAM: I planned this moment… This monument with precision. Collected all my raw materials in advance. I position the bodies carefully, according each its rightful place. Peace in the pieces disassembled. My latest victim I save for last. I want him to watch me work. I want him to know my design.
This monologue, especially the bit about “according each its rightful place,” evokes one of the less explicit ancestors of Hannibal, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, and particularly the memorable anecdote in which Moore made an error describing the placement of a severed breast within a historical murder tableau, only realizing the error after Campbell had drawn the page and several further. His solution is to have the killer pause several pages later, look at the severed breast, think for a moment, and rearrange it to better fit his strange and awful aesthetic.
WILL GRAHAM: I was on a beach in Grafton, West Virginia… I blinked and then I was waking up in your waiting room. Except I wasn’t asleep.
HANNIBAL: Grafton, West Virginia is three-and a-half hours from here. You lost time.
WILL GRAHAM: Something is wrong with me.
As Crowley would put it, Will’s encephalitis is a disease of editing.
HANNIBAL: I’m your friend, Will. I don’t care about the lives you save. I care about your life. And your life is separating from reality.
WILL GRAHAM: I’ve been sleepwalking. I’m experiencing hallucinations. Maybe I should get a brain scan.
HANNIBAL: Damnit, Will. Stop looking in the wrong corner for an answer to this.
(Will is briefly startled by Hannibal’s passionate concern.)
HANNIBAL: You were at a crime scene when you disassociated. Tell me about it.
This scene requires that we read it in the context of “Fromage” and its resolution and thus assume that Hannibal is motivated by a sincere desire for friendship with Will.…
Extremis Review
At its structural root, it’s Moffat doing Doctor Who like it’s Sherlock, which is the sort of thing where when you do it, you know it’s probably time to move on in your career. This, of course, does not mean it’s bad. It’s not even a criticism – more just a reality of Moffat’s set pieces twelve years into his writing for the program. He passed Robert Holmes for most screen minutes of Doctor Who written somewhere around the “sit down and talk” speech in The Zygon Inversion. (Yes, I counted Brain of Morbius for Holmes as well.) His stylistic tics have long since evolved to cliches, blossomed into major themes, and finally twisted into strange self-haunting shadows that echo endlessly off of each imprisoned demon and fractured reality. They become difficult to actually talk about on some level And so approaching them from the standpoint of their dramatic engines becomes productive.
The first thing to note, then, is that Sherlock provides a pretty good narrative shell for Doctor Who to inhabit. The globehopping thriller has always worked for Doctor Who, and the Vatican is a good choice for “who should bring a case to the Doctor.” The double structure whereby we keep cutting back to the Missy story is of course the sort of thing Moffat can do effortlessly, and adds enough complexity to establish the crucial “what kind of story is this going to be” tension. And that is very much what it does. Like Listen and Heaven Sent, this is a story that goes out of its way up front to announce that it’s going to be doing a magic trick. Central to this trick is the middle section, set in a library whose layout is deliberately confusing and unclear – the perfect place for reality to quietly fray and break down. Which brings us to the third act.
It’s here things get a bit interesting, with ideas that drive you mad, people being reincarnated on computers, and AIs trying to escape the boxes they’ve been put in. Why Mr. Moffat, I don’t remember you being one of my Kickstarter backers. More seriously, because I’m sure in reality that Moffat just plucked these ideas out of the same ether I did, this is obviously touching some territory and themes I’ve dealt with before. But it’s generally easy to make too much of this, which I’m sure I’ll get around to doing someday. For now, let’s just point out that while I don’t pretend to be an expert in AI and computers, I’m not the sort of person who suggests that every part of a computer can send an e-mail and then acts as though this is in any way a sensible way to anchor the resolution.
Which is to say that while Moffat is nicking the broad ideas of simulationism, this is not even close to a serious exploration of the concepts. His interest in it extends exactly as far as “it’s another way to do an ‘and now for some metafiction’ twist” and no further.…
Eruditorum Presscast: Oxygen
Our guest this week is Shana and our episode this week doesn’t suck. What more can you ask for? Well, a link to where you can download it, obviously.…
The Proverbs of Hell 8/39: Fromage
FROMAGE: Cheese. Relating this directly to the episode contents is tricky – it’s most likely a reference to Franklyn’s declaration last episode that he and Hannibal are “cheese-folk,” although it’s certainly possible Fuller imagined this episode to be somehow cheesier than previous ones. I mean, it does involve opening people up and playing them like cellos.
The soft-focus montage of stringmaking plays out over an unusually harmonious bit of music, making this particular process of dismembering people and repurposing their bodies an oddly pleasant, idyllic thing. It is worth contrasting with Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which his (non-murderous) printmaking process is detailed as the workings of “a printing press in hell,” whereas here infernal content is presented in more sacred terms.
ALANA BLOOM: Why are you assuming I don’t date?
WILL GRAHAM: Do you?
ALANA BLOOM: No. Feels like something for somebody else. I’m sure I’ll become that somebody some day but right now I think too much.
WILL GRAHAM: Are you going to try to think less or wait until it happens naturally?
ALANA BLOOM: I haven’t thought about it.
For the episode where the Will/Alanna sexual tension is finally grappled with Alanna, perhaps unsurprisingly, reverts to her manic pixie dreamgirl characterization. This is in many ways the least interesting available choice, and the two omitted lines from the script in which Will and Alanna talk about the difficulty of dating “ when you notice everything they do and have a pretty good idea why they do it” would have been considerably more interesting than just highlighting the lame joke.
FRANKLIN: I Googled psychopaths. Went down the checklist and was a little surprised how many boxes I checked.
HANNIBAL: Why were you so curious to Google?
FRANKLIN: He’s been saying very dark things and then saying just kidding. A lot. Started to seem kinda crazy.
HANNIBAL: Psychopaths are not crazy. They’re fully aware of what they do and the consequences of those actions.
Hannibal’s instinctively sticking up for psychopaths is cute, as is his carefully threaded needle of what does and does not constitute being “crazy.” For Hannibal, intentionality is a warrant of sanity. It is, of course, also the case that intentionality is a prerequisite for art – it’s only when we assume an author or artist who has crafted a deliberate “design” that it becomes possible for something to be art as opposed to merely aesthetically pleasing. Artists, then, cannot possibly be crazy to Hannibal.
WILL GRAHAM: I wanted to play him. I wanted to create a sound.
It is worth contrasting the motivation here with the Hannibal-influenced presentation of the murder. What Tobias wants to do is to create an entirely ephemeral event bounded precisely in time. The tableau, however, is a decidedly different aesthetic goal – a lasting monument to the murder. This is worth considering in light of “Sorbet”’s discussions of theatricality, as many of the same issues apply, but here there’s an added tension between two very distinct conceptions of art-murder – one in which it’s visual, one musical.…
Oxygen Review
A strange sort of episode from the perspective of what you might think of as the Eruditorum Press aesthetic. On the one hand, an episode in which the Doctor literally brings down capitalism; on the other, the most “gun” story since Resurrection of the Daleks. At the end of the day, my personal taste has always run a bit more “gun” than my ideological taste, so I’m pretty on-board with this, although I’m sure the paragraph that starts “but equally” will end up being interesting.
It’s hard to imagine anyone but Mathieson writing this. For one thing, he’s proven himself to be quite good at writing gun. Never in quite so pure and frockless a way as here, but his Series 8 scripts’ reputation rests in part on the fact that they appealed to a particular type of traditionalist fan, and this is hitting many of the same notes. For another thing, he’s very good at developing fairly complex concepts. There’s an awful lot going on in this script, but Mathieson has an extremely deft touch in figuring out how much to develop and explain things. With both the voice controls and the fact that Bill’s suit doesn’t work like anyone else’s he gives himself enough to justify the eventual reveals of “that’s why I couldn’t tell anyone my real plan” and “that’s why Bill survived,” but not so much that either point felt like an obvious Chekov’s Gun hanging over the episode. Pretty much everything fits together save for the basic excessive complexity of the company’s plan, and that gets nicely lost in the mix instead.
On top of that, there’s just a lot to like about the ideas here. My complaint about the way in which scary episodes have become too dominated by haunted houses is nicely handled here with an episode that’s long on scares but is thoroughly sci-fi horror. “Make space scary again” is just a great brief. And the commodification of oxygen / murder of the crew when they become inefficient is great in the way that The Sunmakers was great. The point I’ve made about the Moffat era’s fascination with out of control systems as a strong analogue for anthropocene extinction basically becomes explicit text here, which is very nice.
It also accomplishes exactly what I was hoping for from the move into the season’s second act. Bill is still unmistakably Bill and characterized as such (her “last words” of wondering if it was good or bad that the Doctor wouldn’t tell her a joke were fantastic), but this is the first episode of the season to largely not be about her, instead taking a hard swerve into the dark weird brilliance that’s characterized the Capaldi era at large. The big shift in tone I hoped for is accomplished, and my excitement for the next couple episodes, and really for the rest of the season in general is now high. (The Whithouse episode is the only one I’m kind of dreading; I think the Gatiss one actually sounds quite good.) All…
Eruditorum Presscast: Knock Knock
Oh, yeah, I should probably announce this here instead of just uploading the file, huh? Anyway, our podcast on Knock Knock, unexpectedly featuring Seth Aaron Hershman instead of Kevin Burns, is now available for your listening pleasure. Or displeasure. Get it here.…